Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage has tapped a New Right intellectual with ties to President Donald Trump’s administration as his party’s new head of policy.
James Orr, an English theologian and philosopher whom U.S. Vice President JD Vance has described as his “British sherpa,” will lead Reform U.K.’s policy-crafting as it hopes to ride its current wave of popularity into the May 7 elections.
“I will help to build the most serious policy operation in British politics – and give our Shadow Cabinet the support they will need to govern,” Orr said in a statement following the announcement. “Britain needs new ideas. Britain needs Reform.”
Orr is a philosophy of religion scholar at Cambridge University who works in the prestigious institution’s faculty of divinity.
Asked in 2024 if he had input into then-vice-presidential candidate Vance’s policy thinking, Orr said Vance was actually something of a “mentor” to him as they swapped ideas on the future of right-wing politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
“We’ve had wonderful conversations over the years about politics, political philosophy, faith, religion,” he explained at the time. “Senator Vance and I have a sort of kind of camaraderie on trying to work out what the new right should look like in the 21st century.”
Orr was among a select group of British Conservatives who met with Vance during his visit to the United Kingdom in August, alongside then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy and then-Tory MP Robert Jenrick.
Jenrick, who defected from the Conservative Party last month to join Farage, was among another set of Reform UK allies whose responsibilities within the party were heightened this week.
Farage announced on Tuesday his own “Shadow Cabinet,” a form of “government-in-waiting” typically fielded by the opposition in parliament to critique the true Cabinet at 10 Downing Street and offer policy alternatives. Jenrick was named as Shadow Chancellor, focused on policies pertaining to the Treasury.
Other party heavyweights who were named to Farage’s shadow cabinet include: Richard Tice as Shadow Secretary of Business, Energy and Trade; Suella Braverman as Shadow Secretary of Education, Equalities and Skills; and Zia Yusuf as Shadow Secretary of Home Affairs.
Typically, only the Labour Party or the Conservative Party forms a shadow cabinet while the other party is in government. Reform has pushed its own shadow line-up as a display of seriousness about its third-party campaign, which has eclipsed both Labour and the Tories in terms of support.
Farage also explicitly told supporters that this shadow cabinet is an attempt to prove to the country that Reform U.K. is no longer a “one-man band” operation.
“I tell you what I’m really pleased about, a year ago, you look at opinion polls, and Farage’s popularity and the party’s popularity were two different things. There was a big gap between the two,” Farage said. “Now, if I was hit by a bus tomorrow, Reform has its own brand, Reform has its own identity, and now Reform has its own senior characters with their own departments to lead, so I’m enormously proud of that.”
Farage has been a close ally of Trump since before the president’s second term, dismissing contentious squabbles between the U.S. and Britain as respectful disagreement between friends.